‘Mayor’ of McMurdo

SOUTHERN EXPOSURE: Eric Hobday ’82 oversees McMurdo Station during Antarctica's winter. The station boasts sports facilities, a library, a photo lab, a radio station, two bars, and a coffeehouse which, Hobday says, “has a selection of very nice French wine this year.”

It’s April, daylight hours are nearly as dark as night, and a winter storm is raging, complete with 105 mile per hour winds. And it’s not Rochester.

But Eric Hobday ’82 is right at home: He’s the site manager for McMurdo Station in Antarctica, working for Raytheon Polar Services Company, the prime contractor that supports the U.S. Antarctic Program for the National Science Foundation. That puts him way down under from early March (the end of the southern hemisphere’s summer) to August, when travel can recommence at the end of the austral winter.

While McMurdo has been in existence since 1956, it has grown into a facility of more than 100 structures, and Hobday oversees it all, along with a staff of about 200.

“It’s akin to being the mayor of a town—except that I don’t have to face re-election,” he writes by e-mail, the station’s main source of communication with the rest of the world.

Hobday is the first person to manage the station during the austral winter who had never set foot on the ice before, and he finds it difficult at times, he says.

“The darkness and cold take a psychological toll on the expeditioners,” the former Rochester mechanical engineering major says. “But the beauty of the landscape and the people make it an easy place to live.”